Hi. Welcome to Epiblast! The name is partly inspired by PZ Myers famous blog, Pharyngula partly by the fact that the epiblast, a simple tissue in a developing embryo (labelled 5), gives rise, eventually, to virtually everything inside our body. It's a metaphor for how some of our simple, fundamental ideas vastly affect the other aspects of our life. This blog covers my interests; usually science, medicine, atheism, religion. I might sneak in a bit of philosophy or magic if I feel like it. I warn you, the discussion gets uncomfortable and I come to conclusions which are unconventional, maybe contradictory to yours. Don't go crying to someone if you are offended.

All the while I've been talking about what I don't believe in and why and I never get to the point of what I believe in what my worldview is and so on. This time round I'm going to take the liberty to wax lyrical. Here's how I look at the world and I'll admit I've been greatly influenced by Richard Dawkins in this aspect particularly his "Growing up in the Universe" and "Unweaving the Rainbow". Couldn't really read through the latter but I found inspiring thoughts nonetheless.

Think about Death. We are all going to die one day. And that makes us the lucky ones because a vast number of people are not going to die because they are not going to be even born, poets greater than Keats, scientists greater than Newton or Einstien, they will probably never be born.

Think about your life now. Imagine a huge ruler representing time from the beginning of the Universe tell its end. The ruler is in the dark and there is a small point of light illuminating the ruler. This is the present and it moves slowly along the ruler. Everything behind the light is the past and has ceased to exist everything in front, the present and is yet to become. At a certain point on the ruler, you opened your eyes to the world, at another point you are going to close them never to open them ever again, ever.

Think about human history. Most of our culture is defined by events happening in the recent past, maybe a couple of decades. Some of us might trace it even further a couple of thousand years ago but that's pretty much it. We give this period from the dawn of recorded history much importance in our lives, kind of as setting the context of how we should live, but consider this. If you take the tip of your left middle finger to be the beginning of the Earth and the tip of your right middle finger to be the present. Life starts around somewhere around your chest, approximately. The dinosaurs at around your right hand. And the entire span of human history at the tip of your right middle finger nail. Take a nail file and rub it on your nail. All your life, your ancestry, the beginnings of your religion all falls of as dust.

Think about your place in the universe. You exist on a planet rotating around a medium size (yes!) star, the Sun. The Solar System exists as a part of the Milky Way which is one of an uncountable number of galaxies in the visible universe the farthest point of which we know is 13.7 billion light years away. We probably don't really know what lies beyond that.

To put that into perspective, take a look at the following picture. Its a picture of the Earth its the blue dot in a beam of scattered sunlight 6.4 billion km away. I'm speechless about it so I'll let Carl Sagan continue. Read what he has to say and look at the picture again.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.